CNN profiles a Dutch engineer’s plans to green the Sinai Peninsula

Efforts to green Sinai are putting Egypt in the international news, with CNN running a piece yesterday on a Dutch engineer’s initiative “aimed at restoring plant and animal life to roughly 13.5k square miles of the Sinai Peninsula.”

The game plan: A hydraulic engineer enlisted by the Egyptian government to help restore fish populations in Lake Bardawil in 2016, Ties van der Hoeven hopes to use dredged lake sediments and salt-tolerant plants to revitalize desert soils and add vegetation to Sinai’s landscape. According to van der Hoeven, his proposed changes — which he says will regreen the area over 20-40 years — will bring back clouds, rain, and moisture-laden wind to Sinai.

Great plan or dangerous techno-utopianism? Yet some question the efficacy of van der Hoeven’s and others’ attempts to massively re-engineer the environment, warning that the consequences of changing ecosystems are highly unpredictable and pointing out that planting vegetation and eliminating desert land can paradoxically have warming effects.